Chomsky ponders Trump 'False Flag' Op

As you may know, I'm a big advocate of the work of Noam Chomsky. His writing and talks changed my political outlook. I discovered Chomsky when I was 17 and it quickly set me on the course to where I am today. Though I am no longer a left-wing libertarian, I am still a socialist and I think there are important lessons to be drawn from the anarchist tradition. Chomsky is a key figure in contemporary anarchism.

One of the main attractions of Chomsky's work is the level of moral clarity and intellectual honesty. He cuts through the bone to the marrow with precision. Going to the fundamentals of a political question is the cornerstone of radical thought. As an analytical critic Chomsky takes apart US foreign policy and unravels its claims before our eyes. It's a thankless task in many ways. Another side of this has been Chomsky's opposition to 9/11 conspiracism on the left.

Yet in a recent interview Noam Chomsky contradicts his past record on combating conspiracy theories. He suggests that the Trump administration may opt for a 'false flag' operation to save its right-wing agenda. When I first heard about this I didn't believe it until I read the Alter-Net interview. In his own words, Chomsky says: "I think that we shouldn't put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act, which can change the country instantly."

I was very surprised to read these words and I even feared the old man may be losing his touch. If you want the full context, here it is for your judgement:

JF: Do you think there will ever be a moment of awakening, or a disconnect for Trump's supporters of his rhetoric and what he's been doing in Washington, or can this just keep going? 

NC: I think that sooner or later the white working-class constituency will recognize, and in fact, much of the rural population will come to recognize, that the promises are built on sand. There is nothing there.

And then what happens becomes significant. In order to maintain his popularity, the Trump administration will have to try to find some means of rallying the support and changing the discourse from the policies that they are carrying out, which are basically a wrecking ball to something else. Maybe scapegoating, saying, "Well, I'm sorry, I can't bring your jobs back because these bad people are preventing it." And the typical scapegoating goes to vulnerable people: immigrants, terrorists, Muslims and elitists, whoever it may be. And that can turn out to be very ugly. 

I think that we shouldn't put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act, which can change the country instantly.

Now let's break this down. It's certainly true that the Trump administration is increasingly unpopular and isolated. President Trump's approval rating stands 35% - a historically low precedent for a new president. Even George W Bush only reached 25% at his lowest point, just as Nixon reached 36% after Watergate. In these conditions, it is plausible that the administration would want something, anything to shore up support for the government. But this is not the basis for a false flag operation.

I should add I'm not saying the US government has not been guilty of false flags in the past: the Gulf of Tonkin being the obvious example. It's now uncontroversial that the Johnson administration leapt on Tonkin to expand the war against Vietnam. It's also true that there are real conspiracies in history. Look up COINTELPRO or the Iran-Contra affair, if you want to see a real conspiracy in action. There are even questions around Pearl Harbour and the extent to which FDR provoked Japan.

So, what is the problem with Chomsky's points here? Professor Chomsky might be defended on the grounds that this was a throw-away remark - one line in a full interview, with little clarification. There are gradients of what a 'staged' or 'alleged' attack could mean. Many of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists accept the case that the Bush administration had "advance knowledge" and simply allowed the attacks to go ahead. A more plausible theory is that the administration was so incompetent that it failed to act on the information it had about the plot.

This is a long way from the Ickean dimension of reptilian lizards, the whackjob theory that the Twin Towers falling was CGI, or the blatant anti-Semitism behind the idea that it was all staged by Mossad. However, the view that the US government had some role in the 9/11 attacks still belongs to the conspiracists. Chomsky has dealt with these theories well in the past. He would point out that the 9/11 attackers were mostly Saudi citizens. If it was an 'inside job', it would make little sense to frame Saudi Arabia if the aim was to invade Iraq. This is still a major hole in the theories.

I have yet to hear an account of the 9/11 attacks which can account for this hole. Most conspiracy theorists don't even talk about it because it's outside the reach of their assumptions. The politics of conspiracism are uncritical of the surrounding world, in fact, the point of such theories is to reinforce passivity and provide excuses for inaction. Why try to change the world when the Illuminati run everything? They're all powerful. So any attempt to challenge them is doomed to failure. This is why there are no movements or parties based on these theories.

Serious political action and theory requires hard work. It requires commitment. Naturally the online 'truthers' have jumped on Chomsky's comments, while the remarks have left many of Chomsky's friends and fans perplexed. I am not alone in this regard. Israel-based journalist Jonathan Cook has criticised Chomsky's comments. Here's what Cook posted on his Facebook page:

One doesn't need to be convinced that Bush-Cheney or the US security services were implicated in 9/11 to see that there is a deep problem with Chomsky adopting his new position. He has previously suggested in different places both that a major false-flag operation in the US would be almost impossible to conceal and that it is a waste of the left's energies, and its credibility, to indulge in this kind of speculation. 

That was at least a plausible position for him to adopt. But it is entirely inconsistent with his new position that we should expect Trump to carry out a false-flag operation and even accuse him of intending to do so before it occurs.

I have no doubt that Chomsky was right to argue that conspiracy theories are a dead-end for the left. So it's disappointing to read these comments, even in their full context. This isn't a reason to discard everything Chomsky has ever written. Demanding infallibility is unrealistic and ultimately puerile and rather conservative. Let's be mature about this. Furthermore, it is more in line with Chomsky's free thinking to disagree with him than it is to blindly follow him.

The Bullet that Saved JFK.

To many, John F Kennedy was a hero. The pretensions of the Great Man are always a worthwhile target and the Kennedy cult is one such prime case. The legend of John F Kennedy is a tightly inflated balloon that has been wafting across the discourse since the young man defeated Nixon in 1960. Fifty years since the man was gunned down under circumstances of considerable fixation the time is more than ripe to take aim at that balloon and fire. Kennedy is not remembered for the details of his foreign policy, his efforts in the subversion of Latin American governments, his anti-Communist crusade against Cuba and his escalation of the Vietnam war. And yet there is a plethora of theories floating along with the personality cult.

The trouble with conspiracy theories in general is the tendency to apply Occam's Razor in reverse, slitting through all the simple answers to the end. The preference is always for building a vast and intricate theory. If there is a simple explanation, or a rational explanation, then it is to be rejected as a rule in favour of unfounded speculation of the wildest variety. It can lead anywhere after that point of no return. Like the conspiracy theorists who believe the attacks on the World Trade Centre were either achieved with a) US missiles or b) the attacks were a hologram. Once you've accepted such a proposition you're left with the problem of where all those people - in the planes, in the towers, in the Pentagon - have really gone. So why not suppose they were all gassed in Chicago? Or taken out to Nebraska to be shot on orders from Cheney? The degrees of nuttiness know no bounds.

We find the same with Lee Harvey Oswald. There are inconvenient facts, such as the fact that Oswald owned the guns involved in the events of November 22nd 1963 - not just the assassination, but the murder of a police officer as well - and the fact that the paraffin test at least demonstrated that he had fired a hand gun (though not the rifle, which doesn't discharge a residue). Why would an innocent man shoot a police officer as he ran out of a building? Of course, to answer such a question one first has to be open to a certain array of possibilities. If you have already decided that the captured shooter was a 'patsy' for a high-level conspiracy to ratchet up the war in Vietnam, then why bother? There are more important matters at hand. For instance, if the Mafia was involved (and this goes for the CIA too) then why would Oswald be left to try and hail a taxi to escape from the scene? Ignorance is sometimes all too invincible. Nevertheless, the assumptions behind these theories are always particularly revealing.

The first possibility to be written-off from the outset by the 9/11 'Truth' movement is that Arabs are perfectly capable of hatching such a complex plan and carrying it out. That has a lot in common with the tradition of European anti-Arab racism. Just as Western historians couldn't comprehend that the Arabs could have raced to the straits of Gibraltar from the Middle East and crossed over to the Iberian peninsula. The racist assumption that the Arabs are a race so primitive as to be incapable of a modicum of self-defence ran right into the mid 20th Century. It was a convenient myth for the European empires. It was with the emergence of General Nasser and the crisis of Suez that the Arabs were recognised as capable fighters. After that the new myth would soon be that the Arabs are bloodthirstily savages. The 9/11 'Truthers' simply revert to the early racial myth.

The JFK cult has assumptions no less worthy of unpicking. Jack Kennedy was fortunate to die before the 1964 election. The bullet preserved the memory of a charming and glamorous Kennedy, a fallen angel and martyr for American liberalism. It is all too outlandish to believe that the Kennedy administration posed a serious threat to the intelligence sector, the military-industrial complex and the capitalist system in any way. Really the system should work, it's merely an aberration - if only Kennedy hadn't been shot by perpetrator X (take your pick: the Mafia, Castro, Johnson, the CIA, the anti-Castro Cubans, the rogue CIA and so on to infinite regress). It is a reassuring vision for someone who doesn't really believe social change is possible and doesn't really want to pursue it. It reaffirms passivity and so it should. These theories always seem to arise around events which threaten the pretensions of invincible and invulnerable power.

The fact that Kennedy was a Cold War liberal who saw withdrawal from Vietnam as only acceptable after victory - a victory he may have believed would come in 1965 - which puts him on the same wavelength as Lyndon B Johnson and Richard Nixon. He thought it was fine to invade Cuba and snuff out its push towards independence. When the CIA botched the invasion, Kennedy was angry at the prospect of a tarnished record for his time in office. It was the failure of the mission, not the mission  itself, which was the problem. Kennedy took responsible publicly, and then fired Allan Dulles. This was when he made his famous remark expressing a willingness to "shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces". Of course, the Emperor would be furious when his minions fuck up what should have been a routine operation (or worse, as they were defeated in the case of the Bay of Pigs).

As for the rest of the record: Kennedy cut taxes for the wealthiest slice of American society, bringing down the New Deal rate of income tax from 90% to 70%; while pouring yet more cash into the war budget and had mostly empty gestures on civil rights. He was a strident anti-Communist who spent his spare moments sketching the uniforms of soldiers. The conservative writer Ira Stoll has reviewed the Kennedy Presidency in time for the 50th year since the Great Man was vanquished. The Stoll thesis is that the Kennedy legacy ought to belong to conservative hagiographers and not their liberal counterparts. It was the bullet that saved the Kennedy myth. If Kennedy had lived we would remember him as an ugly war criminal, the Vietnam war would have robbed him of his angelic innocence and Addison's disease would have done the rest.

Outrage, Justice & Rum.

 Well Mixed. 

So I finally went to see the film adaptation of The Rum Diary, it had been coming out for about 3 years and I had read the book in the summer. It was one of the early works of Hunter S Thompson, written in a style which aped F. Scott Fitzgerald who had a profound impact on Thompson with his almost perfect novel The Great Gatsby. This is before the acid enhanced tales of Freak Power nor is it the search for the American Dream or an honest politician. It has the early signs of Gonzo which Bruce Robinson and Johnny Depp exploded onto the big screen. No doubt the personal knowledge Depp has of the man helped to craft a story on how Thompson found his voice as a writer. In other words it is primeval to the emergence of Gonzo journalism which Hunter S Thompson pioneered first with The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved for Scanlon's Magazine. Of course it is a "vanity piece" to some extent as Peter Bradshaw has commented smugly, as Depp was out to effectively play Thompson out of admiration for him and his work. The man dissolved in a vat of alcohol and drugs in the end, entertained conspiracy theories and gave up the good fight when he blew his brains out. But these are not the reasons we read Dr Thompson.

The good Doctor filtered reality through a freakish mania sustained or possibly endured with the help of copious amounts of (both legal and illegal) substances. For Gonzo the claims of 'objectivity' which permeate American journalism are false and absurd, the blind-spots of which provide room for people such as Richard Nixon to slither into public office. It is not just a writing style, it is politically charged dynamite and a self-critique of journalism. He once described journalism as "a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage." Instead Gonzo wallows in its own subjectivity, it oozes provocative opinion as well as hard fact and comment meshed together with just the kind of sordid thoughts that will shock the squares. It has a lot in common with the Freaks of the 1960s, Thompson noted the word 'freak' should be an endearing term given the political trajectory of American society.

The hints of a politically conscious youth can also be found in the book, there are references to the "rise of communism", discouraging events in Cuba and the brutality of capitalism. The McCarthyite atmosphere of the day is captured as the newspaper is owned by a man named Lotterman, an ex-communist who attacks anything remotely left-ish to prove himself as a reformed character. Power is consistently portrayed as sleazy, amoral and self-interested. The Americans based in Puerto Rico as journalists, businessmen and soldiers are depicted as a horde of corrupt, perverted and sex-crazed sociopaths. There is Moberg who is obsessed with cannibalism, Zimburger who is described as "more beast than human", the reckless Yeamon and the unfuckable Sala. In the film version this depiction takes on a more political dimension as Zimburger's vitriolic anti-Communism is taken to an extreme, with him at one point claiming that 76% of "Negroes" are controlled from Moscow. Moberg is transformed into a collector of Nazi memorabilia and Lotterman becomes merely a cynical journo seen taking pleasure in the beating of protesters.

The political tensions which are about to reach a boiling point in the 60s are captured accurately. Paul Kemp is seen raging at the debates between Nixon and Kennedy, "How long can this blizzard of shame go on?" he asks. Later Kemp notes the smell of ink as the smell of bastards as well as truth. Kemp pledges to "speak for his reader" with a voice of "ink and rage". We can spot a Republican campaign poster for Eisenhower in Sala's apartment. In the novel, we might situate Kemp between Sala and Yeamon as a kind of "moderate witness" who is not as passive as Sala nor as rebellious as Yeamon. Paul Kemp participates and observes the mayhem, but manages to pull-back from the edge and gets to walk off towards the sunset as it were. Yeamon is gone completely as Robinson realised that Thompson had split himself into Paul Kemp and Yeamon. The aspects of Yeamon which were still necessary for the plot were amassed in Sanderson. So the formula of neither rebel nor passive but moderate witness is partially lost in the film. Kemp remains the moderate witness insofar as he gets away to tell the tale, whereas Sala and Moberg are left behind on the island. But neither adequately fit the roles of passive and rebel.

In reality we shouldn't kid ourselves that the good Doctor was an agonised human being who became too comfortable in resistance at the typewriter. One face of Thompson looked to ultra-leftist libertarianism while the other faced the establishment politics of the Democratic Party. He supported the last liberal to run for the Presidency George McGovern, as well as conservatives such as the Kennedy Brothers and Jimmy Carter who made way for Reaganomics. In the end it was all or nothing as the forces of reaction seemed to be winning in his lifetime, the threat to his vision of America was too much to stand but not enough to seriously fight for. He would have happily voted for Richard Nixon if he had ran against George W Bush in 2004. One can't help but note that Nixon was far worse than any of the Bushites, the atrocities committed in Vietnam make Iraq look like a children's game. It is a real shame he gave up before Mr Obama came on the scene. Thompson was a great one for the Civil Rights movement, no doubt he would've bludgeoned every other opponent as he did in the 1972 campaign.

Get Cheney!

Behold the unremitting and unrepentant Dick Cheney, who is about to publish his memoirs. The book is yet another attempt to festoon the Bush legacy with a little more than the long list of disasters, outright megalomania, disregard for human life and all assorted fuck-ups. This is the man who ran the White House for at least 5 years as the Vice President to George W Bush. The man who ordered torture with such ice-cold ease, only Henry Kissinger topped him in the monstrous tasks he delegated. Dick Cheney lives and breathes war, he's a ultra-nationalist driven by an obscene desire to defend the ceaseless expansion of the American empire. The reign of Cheney and Bush shocked the world in its blunt arrogance and shameless embodiment of everything wrong with the United States. No doubt Cheney would remind us that we all 'owe' our freedom to the Americans for fighting Fascism and Communism to the bitter end. The jingo is blind even when confronted with a wall of mirrors.

 It was the Bushites who rammed the USA Patriot act through Congress. The act gave the state the power to monitor phone-calls, emails, medical records, credit card bills, bank records and even library records. The NSA are currently building a national database the size of a city to house the data raked in. The preference for the NSA over the CIA goes back to the struggle within the Nixon administration between Kissingerian realists and what we might deem 'idealists'. The CIA adhere to a realist vision of foreign policy which is ruthlessly pragmatic in the defence of American interests. Where Henry Kissinger wanted detente with the Soviet Union the guys like Cheney wanted to continue the Cold War no matter what. Perpetual war for perpetual peace is the name of the game for Cheney and friends. The point for the interests that Cheney served is not victory over 'good' or 'evil', but the endless accumulation of capital secured through the military-industrial complex. Cheney and Rumsfeld are joined at the hip, the two of them are ruthless in their goals and managed to strip Henry Kissinger of his position in government back in the 70s.

Since 1949 the US has spent over $7.1 trillion on its military budget, today it accounts for 50% of military spending in the world and over roughly the same period of time the US has "intervened" in over 70 countries around the world. In the service of this war machine which also props up a large share of the American economy, Cheney was willing to go to extraordinary lengths. Cheney and Rumsfeld pushed for a way to recreate a new Cold War with China as the major 'enemy' to be defeated. Of course the military-industrial complex and the energy industry approved of this proposal, but it would have significantly lowered the American standard of living if it had been pursued and "Corporate America" was well aware of that. So the plan of a new Cold War was not followed through, Colin Powell was quick to nudge George Bush in that direction and see it would not materialise. Sadly the entire administration was complicit in the re-declaration of the "War on Terrorism" which has seen more than a million people slaughtered in Iraq for oil.

It was in 2007 that Dick Cheney urged President Bush to bomb Syria as he learned the country could possess a nuclear reactor. It was other advisers who thwarted this plot, as in the other cases. Note the hold Cheney had over the Oval Office was weakened considerably as Donald Rumsfeld and a lot of the neoconservatives were booted out in 2006. The second Bush term was comparatively moderate as a result. The President is only as good and wise as the advisers who surround him. For years Cheney managed to spoon-feed Bush information which he "cherry-picked" without the consultation of the CIA and gathered directly from raw data. This brings us back to Cheney's pernicious relationship with the CIA. The supply-side economics prescription which Cheney has backed for decades in government posts, as well as in Congress and as a capitalist, led to financial crisis and the current stagnancy the global economy has experienced. It was the process of deregulation that Cheney accelerated which led to the BP disaster.

Now it turns out Dick Cheney kept a preemptive signed resignation letter in a locked safe for all the years he served in the Bush administration. Only the President and a single member of Cheney's personal staff knew of the letter's existence. He claimed the letter might have been necessary due to his history of health problems, which is a reference to the heart which runs on pure radical evil to the extent that it almost destroys itself on a regular basis. I find it more likely that Cheney was fully aware of the depravity in which he indulged in as a fitting expression of who he is and what he believes. The resignation letter was drawn-up early on because he expected an enormous backlash against the administration. Sadly the widespread opposition and outrage over his government did not suffice for him to step down at any point. The ongoing freedom of this wretched creature is itself a vindication for Anacharsis, who saw laws as cobwebs capable of keeping the weak entangled but flimsy when confronted with the strong. When he finally does die of an enormous heart attack all we can say is that it would've been better had he never lived at all, but it would be better if we just take a silent and steamy piss on his grave.

The Narrative of Terror.

Life After History.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which began with the Berlin Wall in 1989, the grand narrative that the US was engaged in a war against Communism came to an end. Out of the Second World War, the US came out the most powerful country in the world and it had a powerful military to justify. The threat of Communism was enough to play on to increase the defence budget. It began with the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s were actually started by the Democrats under Truman. It provided a pretext for the Korean war, as it would later provide for Vietnam and then lose in the mid 1960s. A performative contradiction emerged between the grand narrative professed by the US and the actual situation in the world. After all the US was bombing Vietnam to contain the spread of Communism, why was the US bombing South Vietnam then? A similar contradiction has arisen in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, why are we still in Afghanistan if Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan?

The collapse of the grand narrative of the Cold War came around 1990 and gave way for a new narrative. Though for a while things flat-lined as Fukuyama had declared the End of History. The events of 9/11 would open up such a narrative, though there are signs to be detected earlier than September 11^th 2001. As there was a global economic crisis in 1998, as well as the hysteria around Monica Lewinsky, US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed. Osama bin Laden was the mastermind and Bill Clinton immediately seized on it. Cruise missiles were fired and nothing was hit (except for a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan) so the media charged Clinton with trying to take the heat off himself. If a Middle East connection had been found behind the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing the US would have bombed just about anything in sight, with the press cheering it on all the way. It wasn’t until the atrocities struck on American soil in 2001 that the grand narrative was opened up as the “War on Terrorism” was declared.

The grand narrative of the “War on Terror” has been a self-serving narrative for the Bush administration, the commentariat and not to mention al-Qaeda. It gave the government and the media a meaningful way to simplify global events for public consumption. It also sells papers, boosts approval ratings for politicians and provides a way for Islamists to recruit young angry men in the Middle East. The US could have split the Jihadist movement in 2001, as there was a division between the Islamists who supported the action and those who opposed it. Instead the US invaded Afghanistan and in doing so united the Jihadist movement behind the new strategy to attack the “far enemy” and not just the “near enemy” of corrupt Arab leaders. In other words, the moves to "contain, minimise and marginalise" the threat referred to by Alex Massie couldn't include the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The same can be said of state-sanctioned kidnapping and torture.

As Patrick Cockburn has claimed, al-Qaeda might just be the most successful terrorist organisation in history. After all the attacks on 9/11 were committed in order to lure the US into an over-reaction in which it would wage a war against Islam. Ayman al-Zawahiri expressed hopes of this, these was the reason for the attacks on 9/11. The logic being to unite the Muslim masses against the West, the attacks succeeded in uniting the Jihadist movement as the US invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq. With the US and Britain committed to a ground war in Iraq, the threat of terrorism in the West increased significantly. George Bush and Tony Blair had done a good job of acting how al-Qaeda wanted them to. Despite warnings that the invasions would increase the threat of terror Bush led the way. We can all look and see the link between the invasions and the terrorist attacks which have struck in Western countries since then.

History Jump-Started.

The trial of Osama bin Laden would have surely demystified al-Qaeda, it seems as though the assassination has the potential to bring the grand narrative to a close. It could make way for a new narrative. With the snake decapitated there are few ways for the Republicans to criticise the administration and a second term may be secure. There are also few ways to justify the current occupation of Afghanistan, a contradiction could easily rise from the depths of American ideology to the surface and manifest itself in political crisis. Whether or not it can be managed by simply claiming that the US has to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan is another matter. If the man is dead what is the point of occupying Afghanistan? The hopes look slim for the “War on Terror” to be bolstered in any significant way. Yes, there are terrorists still out there. There are also Communist regimes in Cuba, North Korea and China among a few other places and yet there is no hope of kick-starting the Cold War.

The only conceivable way the grand narrative could be maintained is if there is another invasion. The most valuable, in strategic and economic terms, are Pakistan and Iran. But to even justify a war another baddie has to emerge from the shadows. There is no one in sight who can fill the shoes of Osama bin Laden. Not even Ayman al-Zawahiri, the de facto leader of al-Qaeda. It should be noted that there is word of new names being added to the terrorist watch-list, as a consequence of the raid and the information found at the compound in Abbottabad. There is a great deal of speculation over how the Pakistani government managed to ‘miss’ that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. The Americans felt no obligation to inform Pakistani intelligence of the raid because they were "untrustworthy", as the CIA have pointed out. Even though Pakistan agreed to this kind of raid 10 years ago.

Barack Obama has faced a great deal of criticism from across the political spectrum. There has been legitimate criticism for his position on Israel-Palestine and then there are the allegations that he is an illegal alien, a Muslim and the bastard son of Malcolm X. It seems that there is little room for words which regard what change he has accomplished. Understandably so, there is a great deal of disappointment with him and general disillusionment with politics in the US. But Obama never pretended to be anything more than a centrist liberal. We forget that the presence of a black family in the White House has moved the perimeters of what is possible in the US. The statements he has made on torture and Guantanamo Bay have the same impact. Though the gulag is still open, we should not forget that it was totally impossible to even imagine the American President admitting torture and calling for Gitmo to be closed down. The assassination of Osama bin Laden may be the greatest contribution to ideological change Obama has made thus far.

American intelligence officials are expecting to add new names to the terrorist watch-list as a consequence of the raid on the compound. The information is from 10 phones, 10 computers and 100 memory sticks found at the compound in Abbottabad. So there are hopes for the “crazies” who will want to see the narrative survive. Nevertheless, there is a chance that this narrative might have to close and with that a new narrative will open up. The conditions for this new narrative are not unique. It would have to make room austerity at home and repression abroad. It would need to rationalise the lunge for resources in Central Asia and the Middle East. As the US loses its power it is possible that the grand narrative will be shaped even more by China. It is even possible that the decline of American hegemony could itself be the next narrative. We live in interesting times, as well as dangerous times.

When War Pigs Fly.

The revolution in Libya has "stalled" as the revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries are battling it out. The point of no return has been passed in Libya, it's live free or die, Gaddafi is clinging onto Tripoli and some areas which are dominated by his tribe, but the revolution snatched over 90% of Libya from his manicured fingers in recent weeks. The vehemence of the Colonel's death squads procured from Chad, Niger and Serbia have failed to restore Gaddafi's power. The "passionate" support for Gaddafi in Tripoli is really the result of a recent bribe and a concentration of wealth in the capital. Though the Libyan elite has been split down the middle by Gaddafi's actions, which has been reflected by the defection of numerous officials and soldiers, out of megalomania the Colonel thinks he can hold on. But Uncle Sam has other ideas, the Obama administration have taken the first steps to funnel cash and weapons to the revolutionaries in liberated Benghazi.

The middle-men are the House of Saud of course, who hate Gaddafi for ideological as well as personal reasons. The secular model offered by Arab nationalism has been the traditional threat to the Saudi Royals, who rely on a fundamentalist establishment to prop up their corrupt monarchy. This is without the constant insults Gaddafi has hurled at King Abdullah and the attempt to assassinate the King last year. The surface reasons for an intervention in Libya are that Gaddafi has resorted to brute force in the face of a democratic uprising. But at another level the West is worried about the flow of oil and the impact of the upheval on oil prices. The concern that we might see another oil shock amongst the British elite was reflected in Cameron's hubristic talk of a no-fly zone and funds for rebels. For which the Obama administration slapped David Cameron on the hand, opting for a more subtle approach. Notice that the British government only condemned Gaddafi after the US and began talking of intervention soon after the American neocons turned up in revolutionary garb to call for a US-led strike on Libya.

The mistake made by the pro-American administration in Whitehall was that they attempted to dutifully follow pre-empted decisions made in Washington. The Prime Minister then had to back away from calls that Washington believes in, but will not pursue so openly which is why the US has deployed four warships for "humanitarian" purposes and "military objectives". At the same time, £1 billion of the Gaddafi fortune has been frozen in Britain. An occupation at LSE is calling for the return of every penny of Gaddafi's investment in that institution and has succeeded in prompting a resignation... Sadly, the British government continues to follow dutifully on behind Washington, in foreign as well as domestic affairs. From the Iraq war to paying for nuclear weapons, which are a part of the American nuclear command system, let alone shipping off numerous wanted"terrorists" around the world sometimes for a trial over a burst condom and sometimes simply a spot of waterboarding.

The coalition government formed in "Free Libya" has made agreements to respect old arrangements with oil giants. The uprising and counter-revolutionary violence has caused oil prices to rise. Britain has a great deal of assets and invested interests in Libya, as we have in Egypt. If the military had struck against the demonstrations in Tahrir Square there would have been a similar schism as seen in Libya and Egypt would have been torn apart, the British and the Americans may have even invaded in such a scenario. It would seem that the Colonel has outlived his usefulness to Western powers as a "reformed" dictator, who might one day transform Libya into the Norway of North Africa as Anthony Giddens hoped. At this point it is practical for the Americans to supplant the old Arab nationalist order with a new regime that would have the enthusiasm of the people behind it - for now at least. The little embarrassment over selling arms to Libya felt by the British and the Americans seems to have evaporated. The traditional means of redemption are being sought, ultra-violence.

There are good reasons to oppose neoconservatives on the issue of military intervention, as there is a long and ignoble list of atrocities. The Reagan administration turned a blind eye to CIA-sponsored trafficking in drugs and guns in order to arm the Contras, a group of right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua, though this actually armed the Iranians and created a crack epidemic in California the spectre of "Communism" had to be defeated apparently. The Contras ended up killing thousands. Similarly in Afghanistan the US poured money into arming the Mujahideen, who would later carry out mass-rapes and slaughter 50,000 people in the 1990s. The preference of the Democratic Party for sanctions kept the Iraqi people under the heel of Saddam throughout the 1990s, while a no-fly zone was set up Saddam was still given the opening to crush an uprising through air-strikes. So we are right to be worried about where the sanctions against Libya and a no-fly zone may lead.

The wave of sanctions imposed under Clinton led to the deaths of over half a million people through starvation. The less "subtle" method of the Bush administration, favoured by neoconservatives,  ended up killing 1 million more people and left 4 million displaced. This leaves out the countless millions who have been dispossessed by the economic "shock therapy" Iraq was put through, which privatised and deregulated all public services over night. Efforts were then made to ensure that multinational corporations would not have to worry about paying any taxes in Iraq. All rammed through by a coterie of unelected bureaucrats and officials, mostly American, who also redrew the Iraqi Constitution. The occupation of Iraq stood in firm opposition to democratic elections for 2 years before finally giving in. Notably the artful oik (our current Chancellor) and Michael Gove both fawned over Blair, Gove declared "I love Tony Blair" in The Times just prior to the war.


Intervention in such cases as Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Nicaragua (among a lot of other places) was immoral. But the Libyan revolutionaries are not the Mujahideen nor are they the Contras. It would seem that to support the revolution would be to oppose Gaddafi's counter-revolution. There are parallels between Libya and Iraq. The old nationalist order versus an uprising, sanctions are pursued. In the case of Iraq it was a disaster and we have yet to see what will come of the sanctions against Libya. Importantly, there is a distinction between the kind of intervention led by hawks, in Washington and Whitehall, and the kind of intervention which might actually help the revolution. A no-fly zone could keep Gaddafi's forces on the land, apart from helicopters, and give the rebels a good chance of victory. Without a no-fly zone Gaddafi still has the capability to launch air-strikes against the rebels.

Although there may be a case to be made for a specific kind of intervention, an ideal no-fly zone, as there was in the Balkans in the 90s or in Iraq when Saddam gassed the Kurds. It must be conceded that the rebels do not want foreign interference and that there is a convergence of self-interest behind the calls for intervention. To support the attempt by the SAS to meet with rebels or the deployment of warships by the US on these grounds would be idiotic. We should have no illusions about the intentions behind American and British policy-makers looking to topple Gaddafi. The fall of Gaddafi is only preferable to them because he has outlived his usefulness and a freed up political system will be less of an embarrassment. But it could only be a softer, and more insidiously pro-American, version of Gaddafi and harder to drive out. But that does not justify Gaddafi's rule, the Colonel has to go, it should be for the Libyan people that he go and not Western economic interests.

The White Man's Burden?

"Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,

And work another's gain." - Rudyard Kipling

The Iraq war, just like other wars waged by Western powers, was commonly criticised for the loss of life on the side of the aggressors. The implication of this is that the only reason this war is "wrong" is because "our boys" are being killed by the "enemy". The war is fine, but the deaths of soldiers fighting on our side are not. Not only is this approach completely immoral in itself, it reinforces the ideological assumptions of Western "superiority" which presupposed the invasion of Iraq. Turning the West into a benevolent civilised power in the world and the rest of the world into a realm of savages that need to be contained and guided for their own good - the "White Man's Burden". Thus, George Bush's famous question "Why do they hate us when we're so good?" Of course, there are legitimate grievances behind terrorism that go back decades in the Middle East. But that's another matter unrelated to the invasion of Iraq.

From 1979 to 2003 Iraq was governed by Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party, with the full support of the United States government right up until the mid 1990s. It was the neoconservatives, political allies of the oil industry and self-proclaimed "democratic revolutionaries", who had wanted to march on Baghdad since oil prices increased from $13 to $40 a barrel during the First Gulf War. It is these hawks who wanted the fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein, a great moment of optimism for many Iraqis, to become the indelible symbol of the invasion and the "moral basis" on which it was fought - bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq. But that is unlikely given the massive opposition to the war and occupation based on moral principles and an understanding of the historical context of the war.

Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979 by usurping the position of his cousin Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and purging the Ba'ath party of all opposition - accusing his rivals of being involved in a plot with the Syrian regime to annex the Iraqi Republic. This was a time of great political upheaval in the Middle East, which had emerged from the Six Day War and the failures of Arab nationalism - the rise of a corrupt authoritarianism in Egypt for instance. From these social conditions sprouted Islamism, which was exemplified by the toppling of the Iranian dictatorship through revolution and the establishment of an Islamic Republic. Hussein had the full support of the US government as he presented himself as a counter-agent to the new regime in Tehran. It's likely that Hussein feared, as did the US, that the revolution could spread to Iraq and possibly other major oil-producers.

"Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought." - Rudyard Kipling

Naturally, the military support provided by the US came at a massive human cost. The war between Iraq and Iran raged for a decade and left almost 1 million people dead on both sides. But the US government also turned a blind-eye to Saddam's domestic crimes - which they would later use to "justify" the invasion. In 1982 Saddam Hussein survived an assassination attempt as he visited the Shi'ite town Dujail. Around 400 people were detained following the attempt in Dujail, an unknown number of them were tortured and around 148 were later executed. The homes, buildings, orchards and farmland belonging to the convicted mere razed. The families of the convicted were exiled. The Hussein regime later launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kurds, which began in 1986 and ended in 1989, while American politicians sat back and pretended to be oblivious.

In 1988 alone, in the poison gas attack on Halabja, 5,000 Kurds were killed and 11,000 were injured. That same year, around 182,000 Kurds were slaughtered in Northern Iraq. This was combined with a policy of "Arabization" in which Kurdish communities were torn apart by the state and poor Arabs were brought into Northern Iraq with the promise of cheap housing. Contrary to popular belief the US support for Saddam went on after the First Gulf War, which may mean their support of him had little to do with containment of Iran. There were several uprisings across Iraq, including one engineered by al-Qaeda, which were suppressed through the use of air-strikes that were authorised by the US in spite of a no-fly zone officially imposed over Iraq. The Clinton administration implemented further economic sanctions against Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis through starvation whilst empowering the hold of Saddam Hussein over the population.

 

But it is not enough to simply condemn the crimes of Saddam Hussein and the Western powers that enabled his regime. If we just condemn and do not act, we reassert the notion that the West is "superior" in our all-powerful status in the world. Instead of Kipling's imperial "White Man's Burden" - that as superior beings we are obligated to "civilise" the uncivilised - we reassert this "superiority" by insisting on our guilt without acting to redeem ourselves and correct past injustices. So we apologise for our complicity in past crimes and then go on to turn a blind-eye to them once more. Take Jimmy Carter, regarded by some as a "heroic liberal" and is attacked as an anti-Semite, for his critique of Israeli foreign policy but throughout his term he did nothing to help oppressed peoples and actually supported genocide in East Timor. Thus, we must put a stop to imperialist wars or we are no better than the hawks who engineered them with such gusto.

Related Links:

The White Man's Burden

The Trap - What Really Happened in Iraq

Slavoj Zizek on the Iraq war

Christopher Hitchens on the "Axis of Evil"
On War, Empire and Resistance - Tariq Ali
Bush in Babylon - Tariq Ali

Raping and Pillaging in Mesopotamia.

"I believe freedom is the future of all humanity." - George W Bush

Despite massive opposition around the world, the US led the invasion of Iraq with the expressed intent of removing Saddam Hussein - a vile and brutal dictator - from power, to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. Everyone knows that Iraq is a major oil producing nation, second only to Saudi Arabia, and many members of the Bush administration had worked in the energy industry. Oil, the black gold that flows below Iraq's sand and dirt, is the reason most often cited by the public for the invasion today. We now know that 80% of Iraqi oil has gone to American and British energy corporations. But there is another side to the invasion that is often ignored. The Coalition Provisional Authority initiated a wave of radical economic reforms known as "shock therapy". These reforms included the mass-privatisation of state industries and public services, followed by deregulation of the markets and a 30% cut in corporation tax. These same corporations were also permitted to transfer their profits out of Iraq 100% tax free.

The aim of this "shock therapy" was to create the ideal market economy. On which a flimsy brand of democracy would be predicated, as the power of the state had been largely handed over to the private sector. The corporations that were soon dominating Iraq's economy, were fed a diet of no-bid reconstruction contracts by the US government. For example, Bechtel received a $35 million contract which also covered costs up to $680 million. But Halliburton is the most infamous case, a company once run by Dick Cheney, as it received $10 billion worth of contracts through executive agreements. Halliburton was suspected of overcharging, using the money of American tax-payers to cover it's costs, but only $10 million of the $250 million contested costs were not covered by the US government. In a sense, the private sector consists of tyrannical organisations, known as corporations and businesses, in which leaders are unelected and answer to no one, except their shareholders. They act to maximise profit and minimise cost, regardless of the needs and wants of the Iraqi people.

It is these corporate tyrannies that stand in the way of the Iraqi people in pursuing goals that are rooted in traditional politics like nationalism and socialism. The brand of democracy, perhaps more appropriately labelled polyarchy, introduced to Iraq will most likely stifle any attempt at radical or progressive change. As the real power lies in concentrated wealth in Iraq and these corporations will give support to the politicians most hospitable to their needs and wants. We have already seen this in the form of the Constitution of Iraq, which was written by men chosen by the provisional government. This is the reason that the only piece of legislation remaining from the years under Saddam is that which restricts workers from unionising. Initially, it appeared that the Bush administration were aiming to install an iron-fisted government to rule Iraq that was probably not much different to the regime led by Saddam Hussein. In reaction to this there were mass-demonstrations orchestrated by Ali al-Sistani and his followers. The US government was trying to avoid a truly democratic Iraq and ignored the demonstrations, as a result the insurgency began.

These are the real reasons that the invasion of Iraq was a war crime, the pathetic liberal cop-outs that deem the war a "military blunder" are insufficient to condemn the war in it's depravity. The Nuremberg tribunal held aggression, in the form of invasion, as the supreme international crime. Under this umbrella falls all subsequent crimes, like the use of white phosphorous and other chemical warfare in Fallujah which has left hundreds of thousands horribly deformed. Let alone the number of Iraqis killed since the invasion, which is now over 1 million, and those who have been driven from their homes, who number around 4 million. If we want to continue to hold up the war against fascism as the great moral battle of the 20th century, we should at least have the decency to ensure that the Nuremberg principles are not trampled. For that reason, Bush and Blair should both be tried at the Hague. But also reparations should be made, Iraq should be reconstructed in accordance with the needs of the Iraqi people in mind - not in accordance with some utopian capitalist vision.